Nope, it's true, the prices have basically skyrocketed after the Thailand floods. The TR has it explained in several articles, like this one: http://techreport.com/discussions.x/21956 Hope this clears things up.

Edit: Oh, never mind. The OP was making a joke. Nice troll, Buzzard44. (That'll teach me to post when I'm still only half-awake, with a partially functioning humor detector...)

rado992 nailed it. Hard drives have doubled in price over the past month. The Thai floods have knocked enough factories offline that there are severe shortages -- both due to the lost production capacity, and due to distributors and OEMs hoarding existing stocks of drives in the expectation that the shortage will get even worse before it gets better. This is driving prices way up.

If there's any way you can put off buying a hard drive, that would be advisable. There's speculation that prices could start coming back down to earth as soon as next month, as some of the distributors who have been hoarding drives release them into the channel to make some easy cash before supply returns to normal.

Another tactic some people have been using is to buy an external drive, and rip the casing off. Prices of externals haven't gone up as much (yet). This may be viable if you can make do with a low-power "green" style drive.